: Do search engines penalise 'Home' links and/or buttons? I had a client recently express his feelings about not having a 'home' link or a 'home' button on a website. I told him I would consult

@Sarah324

Penalized due to home page is not a big deal. You should check your errors and contents because Google penalize on that basis.

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@YK1175434

The only way I could see this being an issue is if you're using canonically-different links to get to the same page. If you have one link that goes to "/", and another that goes to "/default" or "/index.htm" or whatever your homepage happens to be. When Google's spider crawls the site, it will try each link, and start to discard duplicate-content at the end of links, so you can end up with some SEO fragmentation.
www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/canonicalization
But if all your home-links point to the same URL, that shouldn't be an issue.

A lot of FUD gets thrown around in the SEO-sphere. As initall said, "Home" might be a waste of a keyword, but the most important aspect in SEO is content, so try to direct your client's attention to building their authority through solid content that draws a lot of people to link to them organically, and that will serve them far more in the long run than debating the potential impact of a "home" link.

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@Correia994

The only bad thing about it is that naming it "Home" is a wasted opportunity for a good keyword. And as it's so common you're in greater competition (like the old joke with googling for "here" which resulted for years in #1 for Adobe Reader as everyone linked "to open this document you need the ... which you can download here), hm, but noone would search for it anyway.

It's also just another name of n-names within your navigation bar(s). So all other links would have to be penalized either. Nonsense.

There are sites where "Home" is not really obvious. It's where you land when you enter the pure domain. You could be redirected (forwarded) to another URI, because a certain "page" was configured in the Content Management System to be the "homepage". Additionally almost all sites link defacto the Brand or Logo to the homepage, most often "/".

So obviously you don't need something explicitly called "Home" but it does not hurt either.

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